Wouldn’t want to accuse federal Conservative leadership candidate Kellie Leitch of… let’s call it, being disingenuous, but her survey questionnaire about immigrants and Canadian values sounds entirely too much like the Great White North version of Donald Trump’s racist incantations.
With emphasis on the “White”.
A few weeks ago, Ms Leitch sent out a survey as part of a fundraising letter. One question in that survey asked, “Should the Canadian government screen potential immigrants for anti-Canadian values as part of its normal screening for refugees and landed immigrants?”
That started the furor. It took a few days, but her campaign people did manage to put a different spin on it: what she was asking, they said, is whether immigrants should be screened to make sure they don’t support “anti-Canadian values that include intolerance towards other religions, cultures and sexual orientation, violence and/or misogynist behaviour and/or a lack of acceptance of our Canadian traditions of personal and economic freedom.”
Uh huh. Nice try. Typical Conservative values, of course. This from a party that took 11 years after gay marriage became legal to change their opposition to that.
Wittingly or not, she is promoting intolerance. The Canadian values she is talking about are the old school white Anglo-Saxon and French values and cultures and traditions. She is appealing to the fear of change, to the fear of other cultures and influences, to the fear that the world is rapidly changing.
Has she forgotten that we are a nation of immigrants? Has she forgotten that we haven’t been one big happy white family since the post-war years? That in the 1960s we rejected bi-culturalism (English and French) in favour of multiculturalism – maybe the only thing Pierre Trudeau did that I agree with?
Had we supported a “Canadian values tests” 125 years ago, what would we have today? Well, not the rich Ukrainian traditions so ingrained in our part of the country, because Clifford Sifton – the Canadian minister of the interior at the turn of the 20th century – would not have welcomed the “stalwart peasants in sheepskin coats” who came from eastern Europe and settled large parts of the Canadian west.
The Welsh who came by way of Patagonia in South America, the Hungarians, the Germans, the Russian Doukhobors, the Icelanders, all of who have contributed to our part of Saskatchewan (Bangor, Esterhazy, Rhein, Veregin, Foam Lake)… would they have passed the test?
Would our First Nations people, who were here long before us, get a passing mark? And what about the more recent arrivals from Viet Nam, from the Philippines, from South Asia, from Africa? For that matter, would I be here?
I prefer human values to Canadian values. I prefer variety to monotony. I like the colours and flavours and sounds the wide world can give us. I love Jamaican meat patties, and Indonesian nasi goreng, and perogies, and the German sausage that Murray and the crew at the Co-op makes, and bannock, and pad thai, and my mother-in-law’s bierochs, and sushi and kroketten and burritos.
What I don’t like is people pandering to fear and bigotry to further their own political ambitions.
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